The following corrections appeared in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday May 10 2007

Some words were removed from a quote by the planning minister, Yvette Cooper, in the article below, changing the sense of what she said. We quoted her as saying: "So this is about overturning the principles around the Town and Country Planning Act." In fact, she said the opposite: "So I don't think this is about overturning the principles ..." The error occurred during the editing process. This has now been corrected.

Viewing England from the air, it is sometimes hard to imagine that our cherished land is underpinned by rules, backed by law, to determine what can be built, and where. Although we occupy one of the world's most overcrowded countries, with space at a premium, parts of the country seem to exhibit the worst excesses of the US.

Motorways criss-cross the landscape. Identikit housing estates, with few bus or rail links, are plonked randomly in green fields, encouraging car use. Large, brutalist shopping complexes, geared to the car-borne shopper, further disfigure the countryside. Ugly "big box" retail outlets provide an unwelcome entrance to every other city and town. Suburbia gobbles up more farmland each year. Urban sprawl challenges our green belts. And still big business wants more freedom to build where it wants, unencumbered by perceived petty restrictions imposed by the local council. Planning, in short, has become a pejorative term.

But it could be so much worse in a full-blooded, market-led system in which the individual, still less a company, sees no reason to get permission for a new house, a shopping complex, or a factory in a prime location. And, remarkably, this free-for-all could be found in much of England before the groundbreaking 1947 Town and Country Planning Act established a sense of order and discipline to development. Previously, only 5% of England was subject to a non-legislative system imposed by a few councils. Anarchy prevailed.

Ironically, as the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) and other environmental charities prepare next week to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the act, England faces the most profound shake-up of the planning system in over half a century - Scotland and Wales have separate regimes - with publication of a white paper putting the case for a national planning commission to determine big infrastructure projects such as nuclear power stations, airport expansion, transport corridors and much else. Big business is overjoyed. Environmental groups are alarmed. And even some senior ministers are thought to have misgivings.

But the planning minister, Yvette Cooper, talking to Society Guardian, says this area needs "substantial reform" to speed up the process. "Previous generations were able to deliver major infrastructure projects much more rapidly than today," she maintains. "So I don't think this is about overturning the principles around the Town and Country Planning Act. Many big post-war projects went through planning extremely quickly. The feeling now is that the process has become too complex in dealing with major projects. Whether you are talking about transport, energy, or other kinds of infrastructure there is a need for the planning system to deliver more efficiently."

Next week's white paper will build on a recent Treasury-commissioned review into planning from the economist Kate Barker, amid concerns from Gordon Brown that a cumbersome regime is holding back those big infrastructure projects - and the near 10-year saga in building Heathrow's terminal 5 is cited as a classic example. It will underline Barker's case for an independent planning commission to fast-track decisions once ministers have made national statements to parliament on taking forward key projects, such as nuclear power stations.

Policy statements

Cooper says the government accepts the broad approach in the Barker report and, in a recent review of England's transport policy by former British Airways boss Sir Rod Eddington, for a series of national policy statements putting the case for big projects in the public interest. Areas included will be major transport corridors, perhaps combining new road and rail schemes (such as the M11 from Stansted), airport expansion, expanded ports, renewable energy, handling major hazardous waste, nuclear disposal, energy from waste incinerators, and, of course, the siting of new nuclear power stations.

The fast track system will mark a substantial departure from the current regime. It will firstly see ministers make a major statement on, say, energy and the need for more nuclear power stations. It will become policy if approved by parliament. Specific applications, on the siting of power stations, would then go to the independent commission. Crucially, ministers would give up their quasi-judicial role in deciding individual applications. But several senior ministers, fearing an equivalent of a monetary policy committee, which sets interest rates independent of the government, remain uneasy.

It all seems a far cry from the 1947 act and associated legislation, which created a string of new towns, green belts and, subsequently, national parks. Radical reform swept the nation.

Shaun Spiers, chief executive of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, is not alone is seeing the 1947 act, along with the creation of the NHS, as "one of the great continuing legacies of the Attlee government ... symbolising the belief that government exists to advance the public interest, rather than any sectional interests".

Professor Sir Peter Hall, the eminent planner and geographer, says the act effectively "nationalised the right to develop land" as a precursor - and this was a Labour commitment in 1947 - to the wholesale nationalisation of land itself. He believes its vision of a "large public sector-driven urban development process", in which the private sector is reduced to a secondary role "and told what to do" has not been adequately built upon.

The TCPA, of which Hall is president, will be marking the 60th anniversary by commissioning a series of maps showing the extent of sprawl around London had the metropolitan green belt had not been created. The capital would have effectively expanded to reach Reading in the west and the coast of eastern England.

"The 1947 act was part of a post-war vision laying the foundations for the twin planning achievements of green belts to contain development and new towns to provide decent homes for people to escape overcrowding," says Gideon Amos, the TCPA chief executive. "Today, by contrast, we rely heavily on the private sector. Without the act, we would see a country of unending suburbia in which one community was barely distinguishable from another."

Friends of the Earth, which is undertaking detailed studies of big developments threatening the countryside is worried that the white paper will tilt the balance of power even more in favour of business and against communities. "Big business already dominates the system, and the danger is that we hand over what's left to them on a plate," warns Hugh Ellis, FoE planning adviser.

By taking forward Barker's recommendations, Ellis fears "breathtaking" restrictions on public inquiries. "You won't be able to challenge safety, and on nuclear you can imagine what that will be like."

How far the white paper will go in advancing Barker on other fronts remains to be seen. Contentiously, the report last December advocated some building on the green belt, thus challenging a cornerstone of the 1947 act. Barker's rationale was that construction on countryside beyond the belt encourages more travelling, with people jumping over it to a further-flung commuter-land. Better, she thought, to selectively build within the belt on "low-value agricultural land with little landscape quality and limited public access", while maintaining "green wedges" into cities.

But these proposals are more likely to affect growth areas in the greater south-east, such as Cambridge, than, say, Manchester and other northern cities, where there are opportunities to develop recycled brownfield land. Equally controversially, Barker went some way to meeting the demands of big retailers, who have been lobbying the Treasury to relax restrictions on supermarket development on the edge of towns and cities.

Appearing sympathetic to their cause, Barker urged the government to abandon the so-called "needs" test, which says that superstores can be built only if an area has insufficient retail space. Smaller outlets, represented by the Association of Convenience Stores, argue that scrapping the test will lead to many more traditional shops disappearing.

Along with many local councils, Nick Raynsford, the former planning minister, is appalled. He has accused "pointy heads" in the Treasury of being "out of touch" with the real world. "Their stand is complete lunacy," he says "This [needs test] has been hugely successful in turning round successful city centres."

By all accounts, in the face of this onslaught, Barker has been having second thoughts. But Amos believes the needs test is still destined to disappear.

Urban sprawl

In the face of climate change, and the urgency in reducing carbon emissions, a further rapid expansion of edge-of-town supermarkets, dependent on the car, would clearly divide the government and provoke a storm of protest. "Barker said these [big supermarkets] were investing the money and they will know whether there is a need or not but that's just taking a very sectoral view of how you prove the need in its widest sense," cautions Kelvin MacDonald, policy and research director at the Royal Town Planning Institute.

MacDonald is alarmed by some of the negative messages delivered in Barker's report to the Treasury last December. "What has happened, encouraged by Barker, is that when we talk about planning we think of it in terms of bureaucratic control - not planning in its proper sense, which is looking ahead and having a sense of vision," he laments. "Somehow, we need to change that mindset. The 1947 act saw it as part of welfare reform, alongside health and social security, with the aim of using land for national reconstruction."

Cooper maintains that many of the act's principles are alive today. She says: "It has prevented the kind of urban sprawl we see in many areas of the US. The planning system always provides tools that can be used well, or be used badly, and we can all think of examples of bad planning and excellent planning."

One intriguing question remains. Faced with a similar development free-for-all today, could New Labour ever contemplate legislation similar to the 1947 act? MacDonald is emphatic. "No," he insists. "It is only when you think about it deeply that you realise how radical it was."

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